Boulder's SparkFun Electronics launches educational tour

Company to tout electronics workshops in all 50 states

Brian Huang,? left, SparkFun educational engineer, and Lindsay Craig organize traveling kits at SparkFun Electronics in Boulder. The company announced Monday the launch of its 2013 National Education Tour, an effort to offer at least 50 mobile electronics workshops promoting electronics as educational tools in all 50 states.
(
Jeremy Papasso
)

It's road trip time for SparkFun Electronics.

The Boulder-based supplier of electronics bits and bytes and do-it-yourself kits is firing up an RV and heading across America to promote electronics as educational tools.

SparkFun's "Department of Education" on Monday announced the launch of its 2013 National Education Tour, an effort to offer at least 50 mobile electronics workshops in all 50 states. SparkFun expects to kick off the tour in June.

At each stop on the nationwide tour, company officials will supply a "lab pack" related to Arduino programming, e-textiles or PicoBoard Scratch programming.

Lindsay Levkoff, SparkFun's director of education, said the hands-on approach is designed to give students a deeper understanding of what they're trying to learn.

The tour comes just a couple months after SparkFun was unsuccessful in a Kickstarter bid to fund the venture. SparkFun was roughly $90,000 shy of its bid to raise $150,000, which officials said would allow them to donate the kits, according to Kickstarter.

Officials for the privately held SparkFun said the cost to book a mobile workshop is $1,500 for each of the first 50 stops and $2,500 for each stop thereafter.

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"Ultimately the national tour will take the same shape as the original Kickstarter project," Levkoff said in an e-mail to the Camera. "We're still hoping to reach communities in all 50 states -- we've added additional hardware (Lab Packs) to work with elementary, middle, high and higher (education) student populations.

"We currently have 21 registered tour stops -- it is a healthy mix of middle and high schools, public libraries and hacker spaces."

The newly announced tour supplements recent SparkFun initiatives to integrate kinesthetic-style learning and electronics into the classrooms. SparkFun offers the accredited "Microcontrollers for Educators" course, online curriculum and several workshops.

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